 Good evening everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the lecture tonight and I'm Hilary Sample. I'm an associate professor here in the architecture program. It's a great pleasure for me to welcome Elena Jamil here. She's formed her eponymous firm Elena Jamil Architects in 2005 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It's a great privilege to have her here this evening. It's her first time lecturing at Columbia and also in the US so I think it's a very special moment for her to be here and for us to have her here. She's, let's say, started her office by focusing on small scale projects, works that she's carefully curated in a way, a kind of practice that can focus on ideas around new design work that really takes on the idea of pleasure and delight while also synthesizing constraints from local context, be those cultural, climatic or focused on building culture. I think it's interesting to note that really her beginning into a career in architecture revolved around understanding, building and perhaps construction but she has really turned that into something much more delightful. Her firm has really demonstrated these ideas around possibilities of local and sustainable material, specifically bamboo, through ideas around the contemporary and as a way to innovate. So what for us may be here in New York, thinking more carefully about things like steel and concrete or something like CLT construction, I think for her, has become through the use of bamboo. The bamboo playhouse, a pavilion of connected permanent structures designed for the city of Kuala Lumpur's oldest park, Perdanda Botanical Garden, uses traditional vernacular structural technique of the Waqef to show how sustainable materials can be brought back into use in contemporary and beautiful ways. The firm's many pavilions and different materials afford them the opportunity to explore recurring themes in the process of making techniques, local natural materiality and recognizable forms much more difficult to deploy in larger buildings. However, I think these ideas are not in her mind and built work just at a small scale but are transforming into larger projects, even if they are, let's say, more oriented towards design research or self-initiated but nonetheless are becoming manifest in her projects by expanding into larger structures like the bamboo terrace homes comprised of 48 units constructed entirely out of bamboo and bamboo composite to create an economical mass-produced system that limits carbon footprints and is repeatable. The structures are light, require less machinery, and the material is faster to renew than traditional materials. She is working with specialists on growth and treatments to increase the effectiveness and longevity of the structures. She was trained at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. She joined the architecture faculty at the Welsh School while completing her Master's of Philosophy for a project called An Ordinary Place, Open Frameworks for Urban Housing. She also holds a Ph.D. from the same university called Rethinking Modernism, the Sidgen House and the Mother's House. In 2008, she won the RIBA flood-proof houses for the future competition, sorry, for the future competition, and the My Shelter Foundation Millennium School Competition, an opportunity to build her first bamboo prototype structure that could resist winds up to 93 miles per hour from a typhoon in the Philippines. Her research and writing on construction techniques have been published in Architecture Malaysia magazine, including the cover of the October issue this month for the recently completed Bazaar Community Center, which she brought a wonderful copy for us to see. Her office has also been shortlisted for the 2017 Firm of the Year Award for Sustainable Architecture by the American Architecture Prize, and shortlisted for Emerging Designer of the Year by Dizine in 2018, and she's also been the recipient of Many World Architecture Foundation Awards. It's my pleasure to welcome you. Thank you, Hillary, for the introduction, and thank you, everyone, for being here. It's with great, great pleasure for me to be here today. So I will discuss some of my projects in connection or around the idea of making connections for a contextual architecture, which describes an approach in our work where there is a strong connection between new interventions and local conditions and also the past. It's based on the belief that there is much to learn from the existing and from the past, and this accumulated experience found in place helps us to make a better decision about the future. So this is my second trip to New York. I was here about 16 years ago on the way to visit Vena Venturi's house. Before I arrived, I thought I might find myself in a generic city, but I'm very surprised to find myself in a city that is so unique that it could only be New York. The way the buildings come close up to the streets, the brick and stone materials, and also, more importantly, the life on the streets and the kind of spontaneous activity and the conviviality that you see here. Developing cities and developing countries like where I come from try to emulate cities like New York, like Chicago, but sometimes we forget that it's things that happen on the ground that are really important and what's available and local conditions are quite important as well. So I come from somewhere very different geographically from here. We are very close to the equator. Kuala Lumpur, the city where I practice, is about 200 miles north of the equator. So the climate is hot and very humid and our daytime temperatures rarely go below 28 degrees Celsius or 82 degrees Fahrenheit. So this means that you could live your whole life in Malaysia without owning a jumper or a sweater, but ironically, you would need one to go inside buildings because most of our internal spaces are heavily, heavily air conditioned. So our geographic location in our climate gives us this staggeringly beautiful rainforest which has always been the kind of the resource for everyday life. It's a source of food, it's a source of shelter, source of building materials, and even medicine. And like most rainforests all over the world, it's under threat from rampant deforestation as we become more urbanized, as our population continues to grow and become more industrialized. So our geography, our climatic conditions means that the pavilion typology is the ideal building form. And this is an early, well, in fact it's the earliest photo of a pavilion structure taken by W.A. Graham, which is a British advisor to the Sultan in 1908. And it's an open structure without walls, columns that supports a roof that's very sheltering. It's deeply pitched to kind of expel rainwater as quickly as possible. We get heavy rainfall during monsoon season. And it's as a platform that's raced off the ground to keep it clean. So the pavilion structure evolved into something a little bit more sophisticated. And this is the village house. It's called the Malay Kampung House. And it's again shaped by the direct response to climate and to natural resources and traditional lifestyle. It sits lightly on earth, it's raced off the ground on stilts. The space below the house is usually used for working. You would build a boat or mend a boat or you would weave materials under this house. And on the main upper level is the living quarters. There's always a veranda which is shaded by the roof. And internally the spaces are very open. It's open planned and there are openings on all sides. So there's lots of cross ventilation. And the roof, again, responds to the climate. It's deeply pitched. It has a large overhang. So it shades the house very, very well. So those of you who's not familiar with Malaysia will be amazed by how modern and quite progressive we are. We have some of the tallest building in the world. We have the tallest twin towers by Caesar Pally. And 70% of our population actually lived in urban areas. So making us one of the most urbanized country in Southeast Asia. And more and more of these towers are coming up every day and lots more highways are snaking through these tall buildings. But at ground level, there's still remnants of structures that reminds us of a way of building driven by local climate and local conditions. And this is a typical village house located right in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. There is actually a village enclave within the Kuala Lumpur area, city center, which is now, might not be around for very long. There are plans to have them removed and replaced with high density buildings which fits the worth of the land. So if you'd like to visit, you need to be quite quick to see these wonderful structures in the city. An important lesson from the timber house is that shading is very, very important in our climate. And the vernacular houses has inspired these colonial buildings, which is built later than the village houses. And here you see a kind of a skin or a veranda along the front facade that shades the spaces behind it. And shading cuts a lot of solar gain in the hot and humid climate, reduces the kind of the temperature inside the rooms. Another interesting thing that we find important in our work is the openness seen in vernacular architecture, openness that allows for different activities to take place. There is almost no truly functional space in a traditional house in Malaysia. Here is a diagram showing the interior space of a traditional house. And there is minimal furniture. You would eat, sleep and cook directly on the floor. It is the changes in level that suggest different use, the kind of the size of space that suggests different use, but it doesn't really prescribe use. It's quite an open, indeterminate space. It's the levels that kind of suggest the kind of use that you could do, but it's open to different things that could happen. So this openness and indeterminacy reminds us of the Fun Palace by Cedric Price. It's like a formwork that could allow for different activities to take place. It's a kind of democratic architecture which we find fascinating and we find that we use this approach in some of our work. We're living our everyday lives in this modern and almost artificial world that we forget that there are interesting things that are available that we could use around us. In our teaching class, we were working with craft students and we tried to introduce natural materials. These students have never touched bamboo before, although we live in Malaysia. In this project, we've designed a simple frame structure which we asked the student to complete using natural materials like bamboo and rattan. These are weaving students so we asked them to use materials that are available in their studio. We're thrilled that the pieces that they come up with are rather, to me, quite amazing because they suggest sort of a technique of weaving bamboo onto a structure which suggests that it could be applied in a larger application, maybe a cladding or something. We're fortunate to have opportunities to work on a number of pavilions over the years and they allow us to really explore forms, techniques and local materiality, something that larger buildings rarely present itself. One of these pavilions is a timber pavilion for a local art gallery in Kuala Lumpur and our early conversations with the art gallery owner, her name is Charlene, was that the pavilion will be quite local in terms of materiality so we used local wood. We wanted the pavilion to say something about building in Malaysia. Shading being very important so we suggested the use of these galvanized metal panels and it should be also quite interesting and kinetic and these metal panels would be connected to these planter boxes via a rope pulley system so moving the planters up and down moves or opens and shuts the galvanized metal panel which creates interesting shadow patterns on the ground hence the name of the pavilion, shadow garden pavilion. We worked with architecture students on this project. They are from the local university called Taylor's University so they spent about three weeks of their school holidays working with us on this project and since students are involved in this project we thought it might be interesting for them to explore a technique called tangam and this is a technique of putting together timber structures without the use of nails, screws or fasteners and it is a method of jointing timber that can be seen in many cultures all over the world with slight differentiation between them so we did a lot of detail drawings so each unique joints have to be detailed and dimensioned properly so that students are able to produce the details. Most of them have never really worked with timber so they underwent a two-day woodworking course at this workshop at your university and then spent about a week and a half in the workshop making notches and mortise and tenons and then another week at site putting it up together. So the pavilion is located in the courtyard of the art gallery and it creates these interesting shadow patterns together with the frangipani plants that are placed in the courtyard. As an art installation it says something about building in Malaysia I think it says about the availability of local material and about shading and also about plants and about where things grow very well in our country. They thrive and in this pavilion we planted plants that are associated with cooking so they are very aromatic as you enter and experience the pavilion, you are hit by smells that reminds you of a dish that you've had or your mother's cooking. In later that year that we finished the shadow garden we were asked to design another timber pavilion for a location that's completely different and we were approached by Malaysian timber council who requested us to design a timber pavilion to promote Malaysian wood and this instant it's Maranti wood and it was to be placed in an expo, a product expo like this one which runs parallel with the AIA conference in Orlando in 2017 and so this space is usually a very large hall with very little natural lighting. There's not much to respond to or to relate to, it's only your neighbour's booths that you could actually relate to if you want to. So what we try to do is to create an enclosed pavilion that kind of excludes the external environment as much as possible so it's a simple square enclosure with this lattice like timber walls on all four sides. So when we were designing this pavilion we started looking at traditional Malaysian wood carving and these wood carving are used in houses and in palaces as a way of allowing some light and natural ventilation inside the house and they're quite rich and intricate and quite complicated in design and it's something that we would want to try to emulate but in a more contemporary and modern way. So the result is this lattice like surface which encloses the space but it's still see through at some, depending on where you stand but you are cut off from the environment if you stand at an angle from it and so it consists of this repeating motifs of rectangular forms and protruding timber sections in this three-dimensional geometric arrangement. The timber pavilion is built or fabricated in a workshop outside Kuala Lumpur so here is an image of the pavilion being assembled before it's disassembled and then placed in the crate and moved to Orlando. So once it reaches the Orlando AIA conference location I think we had two days to put together the pavilion. So it was important that the pavilion is modular and that it could be put together by two people at least in an easy way and quickly. Therefore we've designed it to be modular and each module is about two feet wide by two feet high and about half a foot deep so that it can be picked up and fixed in position by one person without any heavy machinery. There are no columns and beams in this pavilion so we've designed special clips. Here you see an image of the butterfly clip that holds the corners together and then there's this angled timber section that holds the modules in this vertical arrangement. Here is an image of the modules being packed into the crate as it's to be shipped to Orlando. In the AIA conference in Orlando it was used in the way that we designed. They decided to use it again for the AIA conference in New York and because it's a modular structure it could be arranged in different ways. So in New York you see that it's being arranged in a more open manner. Although we work with timber we do prefer bamboo mainly because we are a little bit careful with timber. It's such a precious commodity. It takes so long to grow and bamboo on the other side grows very very quickly, grows to full mass in six months and can be harvested within three to five years. And if you compare that to wood, softwood takes about 30 years to grow. Softwood is suitable for furniture for hardwood which is suitable for structure. It takes up to 50, sometimes 100 years to grow. And there is research that says that bamboo actually expels more oxygen and locks in more carbon. So in a way it makes sense to kind of use more bamboo. So bamboo is a beautifully engineered building material. The fibers are said to be stronger than structural steel and they are concentrated around the perimeter. And it's also hollow which means that it's lightweight. You don't need heavy machinery when using bamboo in construction. And there are these nodes and diaphragms within the length of the pole that keeps it from buckling. Working with bamboo is different than working with any other building material. First of all, bamboo is not straight. It's also conical in shape meaning that the diameter is larger at the bottom and smaller at the top. And the cross section of the bamboo is never a perfect circle. And there are no two bamboos that are the same size. But it is a very easy material to work with if you know how to use them, especially in the pole form which is the most sustainable way of using bamboo. We first used bamboo when we entered a competition for a project called the Millennium Classroom Project. And we won the first prize. It was for a wind resilient classroom. The site is located in Philippines along the east coast of the Philippines. So the east coast experience a lot of typhoons or I think you call it cyclone here. So the building needs to be wind resilient and we thought bamboo being a very pliable material would be ideal for such a brief. And we were the only entrants who actually proposed bamboo. So it's a prototype. So it's a simple small building. There are two classrooms, bathrooms in the middle. And there's a veranda along the front which is slightly enlarged around the center. And we've made the classroom as porous as possible so that there's cross ventilation and also when there is strong wind that it will pass through and there will be less pressure on the walls. The classrooms are simple enclosures but I think it's the veranda which is more popular with the children. It's a space for play for informal teaching. Like in Malaysia bamboo is not used in contemporary building construction. But like Malaysia we have a history of using bamboo for our vernacular architecture. And this is the Bahai Kubo which is bamboo house in the Philippines which is not much different from our village house in Malaysia which is raised on stilts. And it uses bamboo almost for 90% of its construction. It uses bamboo for structure and also bamboo panels for the walls. And this project is a prototype. It was built in 2011. It is the tessency whether it's suitable to be used in the east coast of the Philippines. So it still stands today. So as a prototype we could say and it has survived a number of localized typhoons so as a prototype we could say that it's a success. And bamboo is great for structure that has to go through repetitive heavy loads like strong winds or earthquakes mainly because it is pliable and this is a photo of street hawkers. I believe it's in Vietnam and they are carrying their goods with this bamboo pole that is balanced on their shoulders. And what happens is they walk with this fast springing step so that the bamboo flexes up and down on their shoulders. And the weight that's on their shoulders is only half the time which makes their task a lot easier. And the same principle is applied to this bamboo classroom that it could take repetitive high loads particularly during strong winds. And the way bamboo fails is also very different from that of other materials when it breaks the fibres most of the time the fibres are still intact so it keeps the building together for much longer compared to timber when it breaks it breaks clean into two. And we've used a technique of jointing bamboo using bolts and also lashings of strings which allows some movement to absorb the kind of high repetitive loads. And also we've made the structure repetitive throughout the plan so that in case there is damage there will be damage that it would be easy for the locals to kind of repair without having too many unique joints to deal with. And this is the first time we've done bamboo we've worked with bamboo and one of the important things that we found out in our research is that bamboo should not touch the ground because once it touches the ground it would absorb moisture by capillary reaction and once it starts to absorb moisture I will start to rot very quickly and deteriorate and fail as a structure. So we've designed a kind of a detail where there is a metal bar that sticks up from the concrete slab and onto this metal bar is lowered the bamboo column and then it's bolted and we've injected concrete into this part where the metal bar is so it creates a strong anchor to the slab. We've also did quite detailed drawings because we were in Malaysia the buildings was in Philippines and there wasn't much funding available for us to travel during construction so we did the drawings and passed it on to the clerk of work at site and it was clearly drawn so that they could just follow what we have designed. The next pavilion is another bamboo pavilion which is done earlier this year. We worked in collaboration with representatives from UN Habitat to design a bamboo pavilion to be used during the World Urban Forum which ran for a week in Kuala Lumpur in February this year and like most of our pavilions we decided on a simple square form and it has four walls that are filled with these bamboo rings. The location of the pavilion during the Urban Forum to me is very very interesting. It is at this oldest part of Kuala Lumpur at the confluence of two main rivers that runs through the city centre and this is where Kuala Lumpur originates from. The name Kuala Lumpur means muddy estuary or muddy confluence and it was at this, oops, it was at this, sorry, it was at this muddy confluence that the name Kuala Lumpur originates and you could see here the confluence of two rivers with a mosque at the junction. So it is interesting to see a building with a very very old building material or a structure with a very old building material against the modern tall buildings in that area and also the colonial buildings in that area. We are a British colony up to 1957 just for your info and the pavilion consists of approximately 7,000 bamboo rings and they were cut from leftover bamboo poles from another project so it is recyclable material that we are using here and the representatives from the UN habitat suggested the use of these coloured panels which alludes to the UN's sustainable design goal colours which we find really uplifts and really makes the pavilion much more interesting and this is the view of the interior, the pavilion. The pavilion is used to host a number of activities run by the UN habitat during the week long forum and the coloured panels are actually translucent so at night it does emit some light through creating this stained glass effect inside and it is quite popular with the Instagrammers during the week long forum and the pavilion now has been moved to a new location. It was donated to a local university so it is permanently at the architecture department in a local university if anyone wants to visit. So the largest pavilion we did was the bamboo playhouse and here we were approached by Kuala Lumpur City Hall to design a bamboo pavilion to be located at the botanical garden which is the oldest park in the city and bamboo plants thrives in Malaysia. We have about 50 species out of that, 25 species are indigenous and we have species that have thick walls that is suitable for construction. We don't have species that are as strong as the Guadua South American species but they are suitable for structural use and the aim of this project is to demonstrate that bamboo is something that is viable, something that could be used to build a structure. The pavilion is located at this oldest park, it is called the Perdana Botanical Garden and this is an old picture of the park. It has a lake in the middle and you could see it was built by the British so you see the British Governor's House just up there looking down to the lake and the park. Today the park is an important green lung for the city centre of Kuala Lumpur. It is surrounded by tall buildings, it has an area of about 91 hectares and there is a lake with several islands running in the centre of it and when we were designing the playhouse we again looked at existing typologies and past typologies and of course we looked at the typical pavilion structure with the raised floor and this sheltering roof so what we decided was to have a series of walk-offs. Walk-offs are these pavilions as it is called in Malaysia and a series of pavilions under a large roof and they will be placed at different levels to create a playful effect. So what you get are these square platforms set at different levels and as each one is a single pavilion so each one has a tree-like structure growing up from the centre and there is opportunity as you see to create courtyards as well between them. So the pavilion is located on one of the islands in the lake at the botanical gardens is placed at the southern tip of the island so you would enter the island from one bridge and the way that is located is that you are kind of forced to walk along and enter and come out again and exit on one of the bridges. That is the reason why it is placed in such a way. So it sits at the edge of the island with some of the platforms cantilevering over the water and there are 31 platforms and from the centre of each platform is this tightly wound bunch of five bamboo columns that opens up at the top to become the roof structure. From the front of the playhouse the platforms look like they are randomly placed at kind of arbitrary levels but actually there is a diagonal grid line going across them and if you cut a section through the diagonal you could see that it is actually arranged in a very logical manner as it goes lower towards the water. The platforms are concrete, it is a decision made because we want to keep the bamboo dry as much as possible the same way that we did for the Philippine school so the bamboo elements all start at platform level and for the columns itself we had to be extra careful. We have created a concrete stump which is splayed at the top so any water that kind of collects at the stump would be drained away very quickly. So within the botanical garden I think we have created an interesting space which is open to many different activities and these are images that we showed our client before we built the pavilion and we told them it is a space for play, for events, for rest and for performances and upon completion we were very, very pleased to see so many different activities actually taking place at the pavilion. For example there is a dance happening there and then there is lots of children activities. This is a colouring contest that happened just after the opening of the pavilion and out of the 31 bamboo columns five of them has these bamboo baskets and they are like tree houses. They create another kind of level of playfulness so together with the whole different levels it becomes a very playful structure and on the island itself there are many species of different bamboo trees so it creates I feel an interesting backdrop to the pavilion. There are 31 platforms and 31 columns and also 31 photovoltaic panels right above each column and they provide or they generate electricity for lighting the playhouse in the evening and also for the light fittings for the whole island and this is an image that is interesting. I thought you could see the tall buildings just behind the park with the cranes at the top which is under construction. Another building material that we love to use is rubber wood. Rubber wood comes from rubber trees and it is grown a lot in Malaysia. It is not native to Malaysia it actually comes from Brazil but it was brought in and then it becomes a kind of a huge thing. I mean we grow a lot of rubber trees for latex and we export the material quite a lot. So after the rubber tree stops producing latex after 30 years they are chopped down and they are turned into furniture and it is a type of rubber trees are soft wood so they are not suitable for structural use so they are for indoor use. So in an interior project that we worked on last year we extended the use of rubber wood beyond furniture here we use it for partitions and ceilings and this is the lobby to an office where we use rubber wood and because rubber wood is soft wood the colour is very different from the other timber pavilions which is hard wood the denser the wood the darker the colour so this is soft wood it has a maple light colour which gives a lot of warmth to an interior and we've used rubber wood for partitions we've used it in combination with polycarbonate and steel and this is another project which is a construction laboratory or an engineering laboratory and here we use rubber wood as well for the framing of the walls and this proposal consists of just a corridor with laboratories on both sides and here you see the rubber wood structure being used for the framing of the walls the contractor tells us that this is no good for walls because it is soft but if you brace them well I think they are very rigid framing for walls and here we've created this is our drawing we've created ribbon like windows which is continuous along the corridor so that you could see the lab from this corridor on both sides it's also to kind of spread natural daylight you only get natural daylight from one side of the lab so they kind of help to spread natural daylight and the laboratory receives many visitors so it was important that they could see when they visit the tests that are being conducted in the laboratories and we used strong colours for the floor which seemed to work well with the rub colour of the rubber wood framing for the corridors we use yellow epoxy flooring and for the lab blue and this is my I just put this up because it's my favourite image of the project you could just see one of the laboratory equipments peeking through the ribbon windows and also interesting view is that from one lab you could see across the corridor to the other laboratory room across the space before Southeast Asia become developed I mean we are a hot and humid country keeping cool is achieved by shading the spaces and having cross ventilation across rooms but as we get richer more developed more populated the demand for spaces that are cooled using mechanical ventilation increased manifolds and especially now with increasing recorded global temperatures the demand for mechanical ventilation is growing even larger and where I come from air conditioning is turned on almost 24 hours we work, eat and sleep in air conditioned internal spaces so when we received a commission to design a school with a limited budget this is a government school we were happy to find out that there is no budget for mechanical ventilation for the classrooms there's only some money for air conditioned units for the teachers room so keeping classrooms cool is very very important in this project so we did two major things in this proposal one is to orientate the building the right way and the other is to shade the walls when we were designing it of course we like to look at what's been done in the past and our school design for the past 10 years hasn't changed since the 1950s 1940s it is a single banked classroom with corridor on one side and windows on the other for us this typology actually works very very well in terms of passive solar design there are openings on both sides meaning that you can cross ventilate and you get good daylight levels in the classroom without much glare so what we've done is to arrange the classrooms in these parallel blocks so that they're all facing the right way not the right way the same way they're all facing the same way and this is important because we want the classrooms to face north and south as much as possible so the classrooms are along the axis of east and west so that along facades are all facing either north and south the site is quite small and this is the playing fields which is shared with another school and that's the only site we have for the classrooms so we managed to get it almost north it's rotated about five degrees to the east but it's quite a shaded orientation north and south orientation is the most shaded orientation in the tropics so on the north facades you get corridors and corridors automatically shade the classrooms and on the south facades you get windows and we've added fins and overhangs to shade and here the image shows is doing exactly what they are meant to do which is to shade the window openings and the interesting thing about this is that it creates multiple courtyards within the school which could cater for different activities as well. The classroom itself is bright with very tall ceilings we've removed the ceiling what you see is the exposed precast floor of the level above and we've removed the ceiling and ceiling fans are used to aid air circulation in the classrooms. Another building typology that we find that we keep returning to is the courtyard house typology and we've done a number of houses over the years this is five houses that we've done which uses the courtyard form and we've done a number of houses over the years which uses the courtyard form and the courtyard form is great not only because it provides privacy but it also allows for ventilation the rooms are quite narrow not narrow they are single banked rooms so they allow for cross ventilation. Courtyards are a typology that makes sense to us in China you see here the courtyard form is used to protect from strong winds from floods and also from wild animals and in Islamic cultures it's a private space akin to gardens of paradise in dry hot climate water is introduced in the courtyard to cool spaces by evaporative cooling and in Malaysia courtyard forms are found in this typology called the shop houses they're called the shop houses because they are shops on the ground floor and then a house at the top and they have this very narrow frontage about five or six meters wide and but they extend very long towards the back sometimes up to hundred meters and courtyards are introduced within the length of the house to bring in light and air into the house so we've used a courtyard as a technique to bring light and air in this simple and small extension project for a house in Kuala Lumpur and this is the plan this is the existing house there used to be lots of haphazard extensions towards the back which makes the house very very dark in the center so what we've done here is to add a large space which is the kitchen and dining we pulled it back so that there is a courtyard space formed along the boundary wall so here's the view of the courtyard and it does tend to get quite gloomy or dark during gloomy days because of the size of the courtyard is rather small so we painted the walls white and we've used white gravel on the ground as well and what it does it really does bring in light and air to the center of the house here is the relationship of the study of the house with the courtyard and we've created a large an opening as much as possible which can be opened fully and because our weather is so wonderful we rarely go below 28 degrees so it can be kept open all year round and this courtyard space almost becomes part of the internal space of the house and in the kitchen and dining area we've used mesh for the walls and for the folding doors again this is to just keep the air moving in this space and light as well and the folding doors open fully along the wall so they have this direct so the space has this direct relationship to the garden behind it we propose a gabion wall along the boundary and then there's a slope towards the back which has many fruit bearing trees so it's quite a pleasant environment to have the doors all open all the time and we've created a bench a low bench along the wall or the boundary of the kitchen and dining and what this does is although it creates a strong boundary but it invites people to sit and to enjoy the space and also lots of interaction between the internal and external space. Another house that uses the courtyard typology is the vermani house and here is also a remodeling of an existing house with an extension towards the back and it features a circular courtyard that separates the existing house with a new and this is the existing part of the house which is two stories and we've added a pavilion like structure two stories towards the back so the rear of the house the extension is the private zones of the occupants this is where their bedroom the baby's nursery is the hobby room is towards the back whereas in the existing part of the house that's where all the living dining the public zones of the house and the guest bedroom as well as located in the existing part of the house so along the front the house turns its back to the street. Privacy is important in this project so all you see along the front is this kind of slit high level windows that turns the corner and a little hole for ventilating the bathroom behind it and behind this wall is the master bedroom although we are excluding the external it's interesting to see for me at least to see the sun comes in and tracks itself around the room for about an hour every morning if the house in front across in front of the street is very closed up at the back is completely open and as this courtyard bridges the private zones and the more public zones of the house so there's a lot of traffic in this space which makes it very much the heart of the house. We've also put the staircase in this courtyard which is unusual in Malaysia and I'm sure in a lot of other places as well the staircase is usually in the private domain of the house and here you know every time you need to go upstairs you would have to come up to the courtyard and it makes the courtyard more like a habitable room rather than merely just a terrace and we wanted to see traces of construction in this house so it has a rawness which the client also love so we've exposed not only the concrete we've also exposed all the wiring and all the piping in the house. We expanded the raw materiality seen in the Varmani house in another new built house it's a detached house called Sabang house and here we've used exposed concrete which is softened by timber columns that holds up the roof and here's a view of the house from a distance and one of the immediate thing that you would notice about this house is its roof it has a sheltering quality which is a vernacular trade modern structures usually have flat roofs flat roofs don't really work in climate like Malaysia where we get a lot of rain there's this terrible risk of problem with water seeping into the house and the roof is designed to expel rainwater away from the house as much as possible and here's the plan of the house so again like the school project orientation is very very important where we have all the principal rooms the living dining kitchen facing north towards the garden and the pool is also faced north and the other spaces like the kitchen and breakfast area facing south and there's in the middle of the house where the artery of communication are located this is where the staircases are organized and also the corridors so the north facade is where all the principal rooms are located and on this facade are where you would find all the large window openings which needs to be shaded so we've used these columns timber columns which are placed quite close together in order to pull the roof out as much as possible which not only shades the openings but also shades the balconies and the terraces by the pool on the west facade which is facing the street it gets very hot in the afternoon it gets the afternoon sun so here openings are small and they are recessed back from the wall as much as possible and there's a first floor balcony and again we've pulled out the roof and we thought it's quite interesting to have a V shape column structure that supports the roof internally we've introduced another material which is exposed brickwork and these exposed brickwork form the spine of the house and it organizes the staircases and also the corridors so upon entering the house if you see concrete and timber outside inside you're hit by lots of brickwork and if you look up at this foyer space you'll see an opening in the floor which and then you could see the steel staircase that takes you from the first floor to the attic and as you move further on you see the spine brick walls organizing the concrete staircase and you have the main spaces on the ground floor on either side of this brick wall and the concrete staircase as it turns the corner at the landing level it functions out and hovers over the living room before it turns back again to go up and here's the living room we use a lot of louvres, louvres has always been used in tropical architecture in Malaysia and it's something that works very very well you just need to open them they provide security but also allow for cross ventilation and we've used them also at clear story level there are lots of voids in the floor so as you come up you can look down to the breakfast area and you are now moving between the spine walls along the corridor moving towards the bedrooms and the staircase, the second staircase we've made it deliberately lightweight using folded steel and the reason we use this is to suggest that we don't really use it very often because it's only the attic space you only go up to to kind of keep stuff or to bring stuff down so the next slide, next series of slides looks at how simple forms and geometries can form kind of a successful background for everyday life and earlier of my talk I spoke about how in vernacular architecture there are many indeterminate spaces that doesn't really prescribe use and I find that interesting in kind of in contemporary architecture this is an image of one of the peripheral buildings found in the grounds of Taj Mahal in India and it has a corridor on one side I think mainly used for moving under a shaded area but here you see it being used for prayers and we find spaces like that very interesting spaces that are not overly designed spaces that allow for different occupancy patterns and opens up possibilities when it does that it becomes a powerful tool to contribute and to learn about the world we recently completed a project called the Bazaar which is a community building for a new housing development just outside Kuala Lumpur and this project uses simple geometry, simple forms as a backdrop for different activities and it has a continuous folding roof structure which is self-supporting it has its own columns that holds it up and it shelters below it a series of open and closed spaces there are spaces that now is occupied by cafes there's a pet grooming store there's also a myriad of different spaces for different things to happen and this is the bird's eye view you can see the folding roof structure it is facing north along its whole length so it's got great orientation it's facing a field so any activities can spill out to the field and then there's a lake with an interesting replica of a Chinese ship in the lake the main thing about this project is that it creates shaded spaces for example here you have a large column-free space and there are lots of different activities like performances occurring there and this photo is taken in the late afternoon you see the shadows are quite long which means the sun is over there but during most of the day it is very shaded and the terrace along the front is about five and a half meters wide so there are lots of things that could occur under this terrace space during activities so there is no single entrance to this building you could enter the building from many many directions and also exit through many many directions making it truly truly open-ended and very flexible one prescriptive thing that we did probably is introducing swings to the structure which proved very very popular with the children so they are myriad of different spaces within the pavilion and it's interesting to see how they are used here you see performers waiting to perform and a ping-pong table is set up in the courtyard we again use geometry for this bridge project in Kuala Lumpur this is a bridge that's about 100 meters long and it spans a very busy dual carriageway road it's a steel structure with fabric roof on top and that's the bridge which is a zigzag in form and this area of Kuala Lumpur is a very vibrant part of the city where you have malls and small businesses and there are also housing towers all around and this is the train station which takes you to different parts of Kuala Lumpur so what happens is this road is now cutting off this vibrant area to the train station and what our bridge is really bridging this area to the train station so we've used a dynamic triangulated pattern to pick up the vibrancy of the space and this sculptural triangulated pattern is used in the structure, in the handrails and also in the floor finish of the bridge the bridge is quite wide because during peak hours it's heavily used and you can see the folding handrail pattern and we've used a combination of metal mesh and glass which creates very very interesting shadow patterns shadows are very important to us and we've also picked up the vibrancy of the place in terms of lighting in the evening so the place is busy at night in the evenings people living for work, people coming to shop and to have their meals in the area so we've picked up the vibrancy by lighting up the triangulated structure given the opportunity we would always like to use sustainable materials as much as possible like bamboo but that is not always possible as you can see some of our projects are still in glass and concrete they are mainly due to clients preference or the cost and I think one of the main reasons that we couldn't use sustainable material like bamboo in most projects is because it is not seen as a standard building material it is either seen as a special material to be used in expensive resorts or it is seen as a poor man's material or living in a bamboo house suggests a kind of regression of a lifestyle which is why I think one of the main reasons why it is seen as not a viable building material so about a year ago my office started thinking about making bamboo more standard, more mainstream we started looking at the house mass housing and we started with looking at the terrace house typology and this is the typical terrace house that are built and sold across the country which is two stories sometimes three with kind of living room on the ground floor kitchen dining and then bedrooms upstairs and we thought why don't we suggest an alternative to this terrace housing which is built almost completely out of bamboo and to show that you don't really live in a bamboo hut when you are using bamboo material that it could form a very contemporary and modern lifestyle and here is an image to show the possibility of bamboo in modern contemporary development so we are suggesting the use of bamboo in the pole form bamboo in the pole form is most sustainable because that is the form that has the lowest embodied energy to turn it into a building material compared to composite so we are suggesting the use of poles for the structure and then composite for the walls and floors terrace houses has this party walls which are usually built out of masonry and they are quite thick they are about 250 mm and we have kept that party wall because they are important to keep flame spread between one house and another but it is possible to make bamboo flame retardant by coating or by impregnation methods so to achieve this level of bamboo usage I think there is still a long way to go because there are no building codes and there are no building regulations that cover bamboo in Malaysia and I am sure in many parts of the world because it is seen as a very exotic material that is very new so we need to standardize the production of bamboo make sure that we are using the right species and we are looking at prefabricating bamboo industrializing the kind of the making of bamboo frames that are suitable for housing and also skills the techniques that I used in my project is most likely not suitable for housing because it takes a long time so we need to look at my office is looking at kind of industrializing or modernizing different techniques of jointing timber so that they could be put together very fast and they would be put together in the factory and prefabricated and brought to site and fixed very quickly in place so here the rest are just interesting images about what it feels like to live in this bamboo development and I think it is not bad at all it is the back lane of the bamboo house and internally we didn't want the internal spaces to be too bamboo-ish so we proposed kind of composite bamboo panels and floors which are already available some interesting companies are investing into looking at how these bamboo panels can be produced at low cost to be used widespread in developments like this so in this house you could paint and wallpaper as you would in a contemporary house so with this proposal we hope to demonstrate that bamboo is definitely not a poor man's material or some exotic material but we hope that it can be seen as a standard building material although there is still a very long way to go it will be great in the fight of the global climate crisis and that is it from me, thank you I will just have a couple of questions and then we can open it up to the audience you presented so much, I think it is incredibly rich just the process of working, your way of looking very carefully closely at your context in a way you are sort of synthesizing knowledge about the recent past and in some cases much longer through vernacular buildings or historical vernacular buildings and then overlaying that with a concern for kind of climate, climatic effects and environment and I find that to be very inspiring personally something I am also similarly interested in in practice and then to do it through a very careful way in this case of bamboo and I think showing very clearly to the students a way of working from a small scale really understanding a material very well and then building up over time through that and I think you started with pavilions and you have left us with a housing project I would be curious to know a little bit more maybe about what you have learned along the way maybe a kind of difference between working at the pavilion scale versus the housing scale and I think you sort of set up different modes of actually from the joint and connecting to then questioning and I think explaining very well there is no building code, how you could prefab things Working on the pavilion bamboo pavilions is a lot easier I mean we design a form and we develop the details and we get it built but with the housing project of course it throws up a lot of many many questions about I mean first of all I mean it is a self initiated project so we have no client for this and we hope that someone would come to us and say right we would like to explore this idea of a life project but of course before this idea can develop into something physical there is so much that we have to do because we have to make sure there is supply for bamboo there is probably not enough in the country there is probably one or two commercial farms but they don't produce enough bamboo for mass development so that is one thing and also the treatment of bamboo a sustainable way of treating bamboo to make it last for a very long time like timber, timber needs to be treated so that it is not susceptible to insect attacks and things like that so that is another issue and of course prefabrication detailing and things like that so what we have done here is just the one percent initial stage of looking at bamboo in mass housing development so there is so much more still to do and of course we also are interested in looking at bamboo at higher density structures like houses, multiple level houses and skyscrapers I am sure it is possible it is now possible to build skyscrapers out of timber and I don't see why we can't do that with bamboo how do you think about I guess in the projects a lot of what you showed tonight had to do with a response to the environment and being very open part of that also has to do with maybe the program or use and the influence from the vernacular projects which were a lot of maybe beginning with pavilions because they are so light and open and they touch the ground lightly but that seemed to translate into other types like the house or maybe the vermani house in particular where it is very open yet when you look at the floor plan it seems quite intimate so somehow there is a very sophisticated way of playing between a physical space and view but then also a proximity between bodies maybe in the space I am curious about that we do houses but we also tend to get commissions which are more social we do the community projects and I suppose that lends itself to being quite open it works with an open structure especially the Bazaar project and because there are so many programs that it has to accommodate over the years because the housing development is just starting to grow and it will grow and grow so the program that is being hosted would change and it just makes sense to do a building that is not over prescribed that is not too functional and more open-ended but I think to me it is interesting it is more satisfied as you designed are used in different ways than you imagined and I do not know if we deliberately start out that way but we do try to make spaces that could invite different use in our work because if the space is used in ways that are unexpected and you feel that you have achieved something I also feel like you are maybe reading too much into it but to go back a little bit to your PhD work because in a way you also started with an image of New York City saying you are on your way to the Vanna Venturi house and when I look at some of the architecture particularly for the houses thinking about the Smith's house I do not know, you are in the US, could you say something about modern versus postmodern or is that something in your mind at all? I was looking at the Sugden house by the Smith's and the Mother's house by Robert Venturi and on the surface both houses are very ordinary looking but the research develops into saying that both houses are actually very different in approach. I think what is interesting to me more is the Smith's house where it is about ordinariness, it is about light but yet it is very sophisticated in a way and there is modesty to the work that they do which I feel has some influence in our work I think our work is quite modest as well much more than the Mother's house because it is on the surface ordinary looking but it is actually very complex and there are lots of contrived things that are done within the house which is not flexible, which is not too open whereas in the Sugden house I suppose I see an openness in that house that could suggest so many different kinds of interpretations so I don't know whether there is a direct influence between the PhD research with my work because there are so many other influencers growing up and also travel and things like that Maybe we'll open it up for some questions You mentioned treating the bamboo to make it more long lasting and I was just wondering, I know that there are ways to treat it to prevent termites but I'm from Singapore and we still get termites even with treated wood I'm just wondering what you do about that for your bamboo Bamboo would be attacked by this insect called the wood borus and it just disintegrates the bamboo like termite wood to wood so the treatment is now the most common way to treat bamboo is to immerse the bamboo in a boron salt solution for about three days to a week there is no regulation, there's no standard so some people say three days, some people say one week Our Pavilion has been at site for five, going into six years now so it has withstand the attack of, it is in a botanical garden so there are lots of insects there so I think we need to get the treatment right and if the treatment is right and the species is correct and the age of the bamboo when you harvest it is correct it should last lifetime but more research needs to be done to make sure that this can happen because there are so many advice about how to treat bamboo there are so many different methods as well but if you ask experts in bamboo and they would say if you treat it properly it should last a lifetime Thank you so much for coming and speaking to us and I was interested in the last housing project when you spoke about not wanting to make the interiors to bambooy maybe and thinking maybe about as we're trying to think of more sustainability sustainable materials and more sustainable structures but still maybe maintaining these more sleek modern surfaces is that what we want or is there, I think the first images you showed of these very vernacular housing were extremely appealing but I can understand sort of this push and pull so maybe you could speak a little more to that the thing is vernacular house feel of interior spaces is appealing to those who don't live in Malaysia I mean I love it I think people like you if you travel to Malaysia I think it's such a wonderful thing to be able to live in one of those vernacular houses but Malaysians, Southeast Asians, I think they want to live in a modern house in a house that they see western people live in they want glass and steel and white walls and things like that which is why we propose that this is not poor man's material you're not living in a bamboo hut this is a modern contemporary space that we are offering it's a matter of taste and that's what we found out that most people want but it might change and I mean these vernacular houses are appreciated more and more each day I'm really interested in the way that you treat sort of your stairs, corridors and all those circulation places it seems like you have an idea of how to turn that into a more prominent architectural feature in a sense that it will change how people use the surrounding of those areas so yeah I'm just curious to hear more how you approach it and how do you think about it the staircases, the circulation area in your house, especially the one that you're taking the stairs to the courtyard so the more people are using the courtyard as well as the project where you are calling your staircases to spying staircases are wonderful things, I think the architects are obsessed with staircases I think when you start designing your first house you want to make a staircase a special thing and it's a very important element in the house, you know it's where you move vertically in the house and I think it should be celebrated in the vermani house, we've placed it in the courtyard and it's great but sadly the original occupants of the house has moved to another country and if someone else is living there they couldn't live with a staircase outside the house which is strange, which is a bit dismay for me, so they've added the staircase back inside the house so they're living with two staircases but it is such a wonderful thing, we have this wonderful weather, I mean if you're from New York I mean going to Malaysia's paradise really so why can't we celebrate being outdoors but also shaded so that's what the house, the vermani house is about and also in the sepang house, the brick spine walls again I think I'm quite geometrical in my approach so I feel I need to kind of have a reason for doing things and you know the spine walls are there not just because I want to make them brick they actually serve a certain function within the house that they organize the kind of communication and the artery of movement within the house if you can assess the cost and the life, assess the life of the bridge the bridge to the train station well it's made from steel so it lasts the lifetime I would think it's made from steel and glass and the floor has got this composite of metal and very thin concrete and it's got a fabric roof which is Teflon roof and Teflon roof as you know it doesn't let dirt stick to it when it rains the dirt washes away so it's very very I think strong material I think it's a little bit over engineered by our engineer for the structure I asked for a slimmer column so because it's so over engineered I would think that it would last a very very long time for that one I'm curious about your housing project and its bamboo ambitions which are I think achievable but it will take your lifetime and possibly even more but then I look at what you have done in terms of the use of your bamboo and some of like the house that's on the screen right now where it is clearly has a modernist kind of impulse that plays into the ambitions of your countrymen in terms of perhaps these western prototypes but then the roof structure, the shading structure, the cantilever tilted supports are all out of bamboo so maybe there is a pathway where the ambition isn't so complete but you just address those things that can be done and that you've proven can be done actually the shading wise roof and so on and you take that as kind of a doorway into perhaps a broader use of the material yeah you're right I mean the bamboo terrace house is a vision for the future I will not see it built in my lifetime definitely but we are taking it a step at a time we almost never propose to a client a hundred percent bamboo structure we try to add a little bit here and there as a kind of an introduction and we try to push it as much as possible but you are right I mean that's the way to go kind of taking one step at a time thank you so much thank you so much for listening thank you